Faculty Mentors
- Dr. Xunfei Jiang is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) and a faculty member of the CSUN Autonomy Research Center for STEAHM (ARCS). She is the PI of the current NSF REU program at California State University, Northridge. Her research interests include parallel and distributed systems, energy-efficient storage systems, load balancing, thermal modeling, hybrid data storage systems, big data, cloud computing, spatial database, etc. She has published more than 30 papers and had served as reviewers for more than 10 journals and program committee for several conferences, including IEEE TPDS, IEEE TKDE, ACM TODS, JPDC, IEEE NAS, IEEE ICMLA, etc. She has received funding from California Energy Commission, DHHS, and NSF. She has mentored many undergraduate and graduate students in various research projects relate to energy-efficient computing and data science. She has published 9 papers with her undergraduate students in the past several years.
- Dr. Li Liu is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at CSUN and the Co-PI for this NSF REU program. His research focuses on accessible computing and data visualization with explainable AI. He served as a co-principal investigator on an NSF-funded project, “Data Science Program with Career Support and Connections to Industry”. Its goal is to expose undergraduates from all majors to statistics, computer science, machine learning, and manipulation and analysis of datasets between fields (e.g., psychology to engineering). Through this project, he has piloted interdisciplinary projects in Data Science and developed an interdisciplinary Minor in Data Science at CSUN, which was launched in fall 2022.
- Dr. Taehyung Wang is a Professor of the Department of Computer Science at CSUN. Dr. Wang served as co-PI for the NSF-funded project, “Data Science Program with Career Support and Connections to Industry” in 2020-2023 and has served as an advisor for National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program since 2023. His current research topic is deep learning and its applications including LLM and NLP. He has published more than 50 papers in semantic computing, machine learning and AI, data and knowledge engineering, software engineering, and biomedical informatics. He has actively served as an organizer/committee member for several IEEE international conferences. He has taught data mining, machine learning, and various software engineering courses. While serving for the NSF-funded projects he mentored undergraduate and graduate students and published four papers at the IEEE International Conference on Artificial Intelligence for Industries and the IEEE International Conference on Transdisciplinary AI.
- Dr. Mario Giraldo is a Professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at CSUN. He specializes in remote sensing GIS applications to environmental geography in issues of ecological forecasting, global change, water, biogeography and agriculture. He is a faculty co-investigator to Autonomy Research Center for STEAHM (ARCS) at CSUN, where he works with graduate and undergraduate students in ecological forecasting and ecohydrology in suburban ecosystems. He had received the 2018 CSUN Visionary Service Learning Award and the 2015 California Higher Education Sustainability Best practice award. He has over 10 years of experience mentoring and supporting undergraduate students through his research. In year 2020-2021, he mentored 6 undergraduate students on field data collection, instrumentation of research sites, data analysis, and reports.
- Dr. Mahdi Ebrahimi is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at California State University, Northridge. He obtained his doctoral degree in the field of data management in the Big Data Research Laboratory at Wayne State University. His research focuses on big data management in the cloud. He has developed several meta-heuristic optimization algorithms for cloud data placement and workflow scheduling. He has published 12 research articles in peer-reviewed international journals and conferences, including the IEEE conference on big data, big data congress and big data computing services and applications. He is a member of IEEE. His primary research interests include Big Data Management in Cloud Computing, with the focus on large-scale scientific workflows.
- Dr. Marjan Asadinia joined California State University, Northridge, in the Department of Computer Science. Before joining Northridge, she held positions as an Assistant Professor at both Cal Poly Humboldt University and Bradley University. Her research interests include high-performance computer/memory architectures, NoCs and SoCs, parallel and distributed systems, performance modeling/evaluation, and storage systems. Her research has resulted in several publications at top-tier venues (DAC, FCCM, IEEE TVLSI, ACM TODAES, and Journal of Supercomputing). She has published a book as a volume of Elsevier’s Advances in Computers series. This book is mainly based on the Durable Phase-Change Memory (PCM) technology as a potential replacement for Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DRAM).
